Social media marketing is a mine field - full of traps to derail the unwary. The results of two recent analyses show that page size on Facebook is an important factor - but in one case small is beautiful and in the other big is best.

If you are wanting clicks from Facebook, comments are four times more valuable than likes. Incidence of shares and clicks is also related to page size and the smaller the page the higher the frequency. On the other hand, larger pages benefited most a result of the recently introduced hybrid news feed.

These conclusion come from EdgeRank Checker, a service that helps Facebook marketeers maximize their success and offers both a free and a subscription plan increase their exposure and their engagement.

Facebook has recently unveiled new metrics that has enabled EdgeRank to monitor Shares which take Posts from one user’s feed and immediately seed them into the Sharer’s feed for all of their friends to see, thus creating a viral effect.

EdgeRank analyzed how many Clicks a Post received against each major metric (Likes, Comments, Impressions) to give a guideline on how many Clicks (on average) you can expect per engagement type.

The results are as follows:

Avg Clicks Per Like: 3.103

Avg Clicks Per Comment: 14.678

Avg Clicks Per Impression: 0.005

revealing that that a Comment results in roughly four times the amount of Clicks as a Like.

Using the new metrics EdgeRank discovered that smaller pages benefited disproportionately from clicks and shares per fan, as show in the graph.This could be because smaller Pages are able to create more relevant content for their fans.

It suggested that this suggests that large brands should make multiple Pages to narrow down their audience following the example of Nike with its Nike Football, Nike Basketball, etc which allows branding to be more focused.

(click graph to enlarge)

So in this instance small pages do best. Superficially at least this seems at odds with another recent EdgeRank finding - that large pages were experiencing a significant increase in engagement as a result of the new hybrid news feed, whereas smaller Pages were experiencing a decrease.

The findings of this study are depicted in this Infographic.

Click to expand - to close click the X in the corner

The two sets of findings however are not irreconcilable but just go to show that trying to work out the impact of social media marketing is not an easy task.